[allenwrench]

link What's the verdict on this?

[TheDude]

I think the commenters there need to read R-Squared Energy Blog a bit.

[Revi]

Sounds like a great idea to me. I think algae ponds would be okay, but the greenhouse pictured in the movie could be a bit pricey.
I think you can make butanol from some kind of algae that you can run a car on quite nicely.
link

It's another form of solar energy.
I wonder how much energy you can get off of an acre of solar panels? Then you can use it to run an electric vehicle.

[bkwillia]

Show me. Where is all the oil that his greenhouse is producing? How much did it cost to produce it? How much energy did it take to manufacture the system and how long does it last? How much energy does it take to refine the algae into pure fuel?
The man is quoting a lot of big numbers, but never showed us a drop of fuel. Why? Its all very interesting, but it smells like a dot com scam.

[aflurry]

there seems to be a conservation of energy problem here....what are the inputs? sunlight? what is the total amount of energy contained in every photon hitting an acre in one year? subtract for heat loss. divide by the efficiency ratio of photosynthesis. and that's overly generous.

compare this to that of 20000 gallons of oil. if sunlight alone doesn't have the energy, then it's coming from other inputs... soil? nutrients? other fossil fuel inputs? it has to come from somewhere. so what's the cost?

[bkwillia]

A quick calculation and I get a 15% conversion efficiency from sunlight to oil. This is as good as photovoltaics... That this guy can even quote these numbers is criminal misrepresentation.

[smallpoxgirl]

If we took one tenth of the state of New Mexico and converted it to algae production, we could meet all the energy demands for the entire United States

That my friends is one h-ll of a big greenhouse. That would be a 12,000 sqaure mile greenhouse or about 77,000 times the size of the largest building ever constructed.

The truth is that algal biofuels are a very interesting technology. One day they may produce a large percentage of our motor fuels. At present they are experimental. Once the guy has a production reactor up and running and producing 20,000 gallons a year, that will be the time to get excited. Under no circumstances are we going to build a 12,000 square mile greenhouse in New Mexico. If we did, we'd have to build another one every few years, because demand is not a static number. It increases over time. The bottom line for any of the alternative fuels is that they're not crude oil. The are expensive and difficult, and under the best of circumstances we're going to have to learn to get by with a lot less.

[WisJim]

There is a large dairy farm in western Wisconsin that has a methane digester producing methane that is put into the natural gas pipeline. They are using some of the warm water from the digester process to grow algae and are getting up to 60 gallons of oil for biodiesel a day from the algae (according to a friend who took a school group on a tour of the facility). Not much about it on the internet, though. Emerald dairy

[ANewHuman]

You must remember people in this day and age ACTUALLY THINK that food grows out of nothing. They think dirt contains nothing valuable, that you just need to water it and "shit happens".

So when you realize this, it doesn't surprise me people think algae can just grow without anything needed besides water. Factoring in trace minerals, "food/fertilizer" and ensuring correct water temperature is expensive. Trying to maximize growth by supplementing with CO2 (which is what they would need to do to get the most out of this system) would completely DWARF the other costs. People don't realize how expensive CO2 GENERATION actually is. There is no way you can cheaply generate it, and all our waste CO2 is much too hard to capture cleanly (you can't give plants toxic shit mixed with CO2 as it would kill them or limit the reaction).

So I think this stuff will either exist in an unoptimized state, with no CO2 supply, or not at all. Even without the CO2 it is very very expensive, the CO2 and airflow system just throws it out into another league.

[ushoys]

"You must remember people in this day and age ACTUALLY THINK that food grows out of nothing. They think dirt contains nothing valuable, that you just need to water it and "crap happens".

Algae will grow in water on a diet consisting solely of sunlight and C02. But greenhouse production is clearly impractical on any scale. The only hope for commercially viable oil-from-algae seems to be from its production in huge open areas of water.

[mos6507]

I've seen these guys before. What I really want to know is how much electricity is consumed constantly circulating the water. That could seriously cut into the EROEI. Hopefully the power for the pumps is modest enough to be powered by PV solar.

[sparky]

Energy is everywhere, there is hardly anything alive on earth which could not be used to make some , if only by rotting

but a large positive return .........?

[TheDude]

Energy is everywhere ,
there is hardly anything alive on earth which could not be used to make some , if only by rotting
but a large positive return .........?

Too many syllables in your haiku.

[Carlhole]

Darpa, Dronemaker to Brew Algae-Based Jet Fuel

Pentagon way-out research arm Darpa and Predator dronemaker General Atomics are teaming up to try to turn algae into jet fuel. The Defense Department announced the $20 million deal earlier in the week.

The idea is to "demonstrate and ultimately commercialize the affordable production" of an algae-based surrogate for JP-8 jet fuel by 2010. The work is going to be spread all over the country, from the Scripps Institutions of Oceanography near San Diego to Hawaii Bio Energy in Honolulu to the University of North Dakota's Energy and Environmental research center. General Atomics also seems to have pulled down an extra $4 million in Congressional pork money to set up a plant-fuel research facility at Eastern Kentucky University.

[sparky]

the dude show the way

while the pentagon dream awake

alguae dream of the sea

[vtsnowedin]

Funny that we should return to this with gas at $1.75. My eyes glaze over when I read the first lie (or to be more charitable error) in an article. 50% oil by weight?? The research papers I've read claim 30% in a test tube but not even that in a pilot plant.
Has anyone heard any real news from that algae farm they started in Texas in a defunct shrimp farm? Must be they haven't met their stated goals or we would have heard about it. Of course a couple of hurricanes raked them over this year so there may be good reason for delay.

When oil gets scarce enough I think we will get at least a part of our liquid fuel from algae. We can use nutrient laden water from the lower Mississippi (amoung other sources) before it dumps out into the gulf and causes that dead zone. You could devote half the acreage to PV panels to run the pumps so that all your production was net gain from the site. The CO2 can come from just straight air bubbled through the water. The algae in my swimming pool never had any trouble gettting it that way. If they take the 70% that remains after the lipids are skimmed off and plow it into farmland the CO2 remaining in it will get sequestered in the soil though I don't know what proportion of the carbon taken up by the algae would be in the residue.
How much will it cost per gallon? Certainly more then $1.75 and probably more then $5.00 at least at first but there is no shortage of dirt to build ponds with or sand to make glass for green houses if they prove to work better and all the labor can be done by Americans keeping our energy dollars here.

[sparky]

In fact yes rivers and stream have a fair bit of nutrients
This got me thinking, keep in mind Xmass is heavy drinking around here .

sewage: it need to be cleaned up , it's usually warm ,
rich in organics and very often has pumped pipes.

of course heaps of problems with antibiotics and other chemicals but well worth a pilot trial try.

Under glass and plastic
men dream of power
Algae dream of the sea

getting there.